Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Farm Class

I came upon this link the other day Homestead Heritage.If you visit you will find this place in Texas that offers classes in basic education of country things such as cheese making, spinning wool and weaving. It offers other classes such as how to garden, raise goats, black smithing and so on. It offers classes on learning the old country crafts that a lot of people are looking to learn these days.

It would be so cool to start a program here and market it to folks in Portland or new arrivals out here.

And if there is anyone who wants to take a physical education class we can always have wood splitting, post hole digging, manure management and hay stacking.

Set out the rounds from the whole tree on end, and then just go after them like a maniac. Look for the crack in each round and hit it on the outer edge. A good six pound maul is all you need, unless it's all knotty pine.

I can't run as fast as I used to, but I was pretty handy at tricking and catching horses in wide open spaces that didnt want to be caught. And Lambing? My grandfather had 5000 sheep-you talk about work, jeez, from the end of February to the first of June it was go go go. All that feeding, watering etc. Going out in all weather every half hour to collect the fresh dropped lambs and coax the ewe to "jughouse"(sometimes that can get pretty confusing in the dark figuring out who belongs to who)-so they can "mother up" for a several days before we'd start mixing them in ever increasing numbers or "bunches"-branding the new pairs with special black gooey paint-each lamb and ewe got there own number so we new exactly where we were in the count....then the nutting and cutting-I'll bet I've bit the nuts off more lambs than anyone in this county-I was good at it-the oldtimers told me so-- and at the end of the day carefully counting up how many lamb's tails were piled up at the docking pens in strange looking mounds of the soft wooly things...and when the shearers come somebody is going to have to do a lot of cooking-that is a real big show and those guys really can eat. The women who cook for the ranches and big farms in our state really know there business-they should, they had really good teachers around here the past 150 years or so.